Former New York governor George Pataki announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, a quest that he himself has acknowledged is "an extreme long shot." Pataki, who last held office in 2006, has long toyed with the idea of running for office, finally jumping in at a point where he has particularly low name recognition and barely registers in national opinion polls.

A Pataki-for-president campaign has been long in coming, and there is a heavy sense of anticlimax to the announcement: In 1998, Mr. Pataki declined to pledge that he would serve a full second term as governor, raising the prospect of a national campaign in 2000 that never jelled. Before the 2008 and 2012 elections, Mr. Pataki formed committees to help prepare for White House bids that did not materialize.

Mr. Pataki has acknowledged the here-we-go-again dimension to his 2016 effort. At a gathering of political donors, hosted this year by the wealthy real estate developer Earle I. Mack, Mr. Pataki joked that some things simply happened every four years: the Olympics, for instance, and George Pataki’s visiting New Hampshire...

Since leaving office, Mr. Pataki has seemed at times like a political lost soul: He founded a business advisory firm and joined a law firm, Chadbourne & Parke, but he has struggled to maintain his footing in national Republican circles.

He has associated himself with no fewer than a half-dozen political action committees and nonprofit political groups, several of them raising and spending only nominal sums on electioneering.